Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump criticized President Barack Obama’s reaction to the terror attack in Orlando, saying Monday that Obama is either “not smart” or he has “something else in mind.”
“And the something else in mind — you know, people can’t believe it. People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can’t even mention the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism,'” Trump said on Fox News Monday morning. He added, “there’s something going on. It’s inconceivable. There’s something going on.”
On Sunday, Trump asked Obama to resign for his refusal to use the phrase “radical Islam.” Obama described the mass shooting in Orlando as “act of terror and an act of hate.”
“He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands — it’s one or the other, and either one is unacceptable,” Trump said. Trump is not the first to raise the possibility that President Obama knows more than he is letting on. Rubio infamously repeated himself four times saying, “let’s dispel once and for all with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.”
In a later interview Monday morning on the Today show, Trump said, “A lot of people think maybe he doesn’t want to know about it. I happen to think that he just doesn’t know what he’s doing, but there are many people that think maybe he doesn’t want to get it. He doesn’t want to see what’s really happening. And that could be.”
When pressed by Today’s Savannah Guthrie why Obama wouldn’t want to “get it,” Trump said, “because Savannah, Savannah, why isn’t he addressing the issue? He’s not addressing the issue. He’s not calling it what it is. This is radical Islamic terrorism. This isn’t fighting Germany; this isn’t fighting Japan, where they wear uniforms.”